Chile Forum

Chile Forum in English for Gringos, Expatriates, and Travelers to Exchange Ideas and Information about Chile, South America. For more than a decade, the Chile Forum has been the center for expats to share their collective knowledge and experience about living in Chile. The Chile Forum is a free community service brought to you by the law office of Spencer Global.

Given the amount of space the article gives to Argentina, it's not about Latin American economic prospects at all, but about trying to help Macri's re-election. When was the last time the Forbes published something remotely interesting anyway?

setting aside the argument in that article, i do believe latin america is being under apreciated. in spite of the tendency of latin American countries to commit political and economic suicide on a regular basis, the populations might be smaller than asia but overall are a richer; or, more exactly, latin america has a large and fast growing middle class than asia. it needs to get 5he politics sorted out that keeps holding it back.

really though it is not an either / or sort of thing. if Asia does good, latin america will do good.

FYI, there is a fairly steady stream of Argentina's moving to chile too.

Europe's nice in comparison to Argentina, but the high income and social security taxes will put a dent in the income of those trying to earn their living earning a wage. Chile really seems to be a much more reasonable option.

the striking stat in that article was the 80% that said they wanted to leave.

There is probably some correlation between when a country gets stats like that, and long-term damage to the economy; assuming here a much smaller percentage actually leave.

It would be interesting to see some comprehensive study of immigrants to chile, to see just how much chile is benefitting from the brain drain around the continent.

I am seriously against chile taking in thousands of low skill or low educated migrants at this point in its development. chile has plenty of its own. however, I am for chile atracting highly educated and high skilled migrants.

Much cheaper for chile to say import a well educated 25 or 30 year old, than produce one domestically; while chile is in the process of reforming its own education system, that will take chile at least a generation to figure out if they got it right or any results at all from it.

I am seriously against chile taking in thousands of low skill or low educated migrants at this point in its development. chile has plenty of its own. however, I am for chile atracting highly educated and high skilled migrants.

I like that a lot of supposedly low skill customer facing jobs are now taken up by foreigners. Their service skills are years ahead of anything I got from Chileans before. Call-centers, restaurants. My Peruvian mechanic and the Haitian cleaner guy in my building - that building has never been so clean before. These are changes that have made my day to day life a lot more pleasant, and those are not highly skilled people.

the problem with most those low skilled jobs, many should not exist at all. in fact, it was the crappy inefficient workers in chile that created them in the first place or at least will go away shortly.

for example the stores that still have three employees to do a simple sale of an item. one gets you the item. one takes your money. one puts it in the bag.

or how about the companies with millions of dollars in "self service" kiosks, with two to five employees standing around the machine to help you use it.

someday chilean manegers will get the point of autonation, and then chile will be stuck with even more poor people to support.

however, with sufficient influx first of high skilled workers, chile should be able to maintain sufficient demand to support the low skilled workers or otherwise transition them to more technicals jobs.

I am seriously against chile taking in thousands of low skill or low educated migrants at this point in its development. chile has plenty of its own. however, I am for chile atracting highly educated and high skilled migrants.

I like that a lot of supposedly low skill customer facing jobs are now taken up by foreigners. Their service skills are years ahead of anything I got from Chileans before. Call-centers, restaurants. My Peruvian mechanic and the Haitian cleaner guy in my building - that building has never been so clean before. These are changes that have made my day to day life a lot more pleasant, and those are not highly skilled people.

It takes a specific set of personal qualities to emigrate and establish yourself in a new country, so this is the difference between the most determined people from their nations and the local average joes.

There is a whole mess of studies that have determined that people don't migrate much to other countries after about 30 years old. Which makes sense, starting over is typically a slow process at any age, but much easier when say you are 25 years old, have a freshly minted university degree, and don't have much to loose back home anyway.

Typically you need a certain scale to tip in favour of ample opportunities where you are going, and being pushed out by lack of opportunities where you are coming from.

In fact, even say people retiring from the States or Europe to Chile, with money and resources, pretty much are doing the same calculation in a different form at a different stage of their life (e.g. cheaper cost of living, less taxes, etc). What we have seen in recent years from our own clients is a lot of retired or otherwise financially independent people moving to Chile for nothing more than stability. Financial stability, regulatory stability, tax stability, political stability. That pretty much has held constant over the years, regardless if they are from Argentina, the United States, Europe, or say even China. There has been a steady increase in people that have something to loose, and are now looking for somewhere that will protect what they have with some sort of predictable trend.

For people that are retired especially, it is not very encouraging to see for example the massive public debts, with populace back and forth, major political indecisions, lack of infrastructure investment, all stopping them from doing any sort of long-term planning. they are reading the writing is on the wall. You don't want to for example, just retire, and 20 years out have a major tax surprise while health and other public services are being cut around you.

Overall, people rarely leave somewhere because they are happy with their life.

That is probably Chile's biggest attraction to individuals, rich and poor, old and young, companies, etc, simply stability. Chile seems to have hit a sweet spot of changing and reforming sufficiently fast to get something done, but not so fast and hap hazard as to undermine stability.

In fact, that was one of the most serious criticism of the last Bachelet administration (even by comparison to her former administration) was what one commenter termed "legislative hysteria", where they were rushing half-baked laws through congress without studying the consequences. Thus, all the "reforms" to the "reforms" that is going on now. Chileans, overall as a nation, as a culture, don't really like things changing that radically.

Another way to put it is, Chile is a very "conservative liberal progressive" country. Which has a tendency to make gringo's heads explode that misinterpret that through the rose coloured glasses of U.S. politics, or some other countries cultural politics. For example, It is like take Marijuana legalization. Everyone, for the most part, is on board with that, left and right (legalization I think has had a consistent support of over 70%, and we have right and left wing congressmen admitting to smoking). They just want it done right. The last attempt at reform literally turned in to a half-baked mess with the "o.k., we will make it legal for you to smoke pot by yourself at home", just you can not buy it, sell it, transport it, grow it, share it, or basically do anything required to be able to smoke pot at home by yourself.

Same with immigration reform. Education reform. tax reform. The former administration, with a bunch of millennials at the helm, tried to "move fast and break things", and as a result just ended up mostly breaking things. Chileans were pretty clear in the last election, they didn't like that.

This grim chart is circulating on Reddit but fear not, according to the original OECD's report on the country's skills, "Younger adults in Chile are more proficient in literacy and numeracy than their older counterparts – by a larger margin than on average across OECD countries."